Originally I had set out to write my own software to turn photographs of planets into map projections, but after a while it became apparent that WinJupos was better at this than my software was ever going to be. WinJupos has a bit of a learning curve, but after a few YouTube tutorials I only have to focus on taking good images!
WinJupos takes your location and the time that you took your photo to estimate the exact face of the planet you are looking at. From that information it can also unwrap your image into a mercator projection map, meaning with enough photos you can fill in an entire planetary map!
The goal was to create full planet maps of Mars and Jupiter, and I’m very pleased with the results in 2020! Jupiter was my test case, so that map isn’t quite as impressive as Mars. With Mars I had the benefit of seeing my past mistakes and areas for improvement.
Jupiter
Current Map as of Summer 2020:
Obviously a map of Jupiter won’t be very accurate since the clouds are always in motion, but with my telescope I doesn’t really catch enough detail for that to be much of a hindrance. It was a good first try at creating a map, though I have some pretty clear color and brightness delineations from each individual image.
There are issues with this map, but it was a good first attempt at using WinJupos. This image will likely be replaced with better images now that I’m more comfortable with the technique.
For Mars I will have to be more careful about taking the photos exactly the same each time, and not just winging it on the camera exposure settings.
Images used to generate this:
Mars
After working on the map of Jupiter and seeing my mistakes and issues I was able to solidify my process for Mars. Essentially I locked down my camera settings so the color and brightness would be as stable as possible across all images. The procedure worked, though some nights were slightly hazy which through off the brightness somewhat. After a bit of photoshopping I was able to normalize the colors enough so that they blended relatively seamlessly.
Each photo made a single piece of the map, and I combined them together in StarStax to create the full map. StarStax worked well, but it’s clearly not meant for this purpose, so some manual touch-ups were needed.
Once I was able to make a map I was then able to wrap that map as a texture onto a sphere, which gives me a fully CG Mars! Now I can have fun annotating the map, animating it, whatever I’d like!
Current Map as of Fall 2020:
There is also some fun we can have with this map:
